Other additions are catching up with WordPress for iOS, but they're welcome. The post editor now has a formatting toolbar above the keyboard, and the app now has a tablet view. The app also adds post uploading in the background and gets a few other fixes. This is an open-source app, and it's the best mobile blogging interface I've seen yet. What's up with everybody else?

WordPress for iOS is fine. Our Marshall Kirkpatrick finds it to be a knock-out, but that may be Stockholm syndrome. I use it, too, and it works, but it's awfully hard to use compared to this new Android version. The Action Bar and Dashboard should become the standard. I love that it's the result of open-source collaboration.

So, what's up, blogging platforms? The world is mobile now, and helping us blog while we're out is a surefire way to keep users engaged. WordPress for Android has pivoted back toward the light, but most of the pivots in this area have been toward social networking and away from writing posts.

Do you blog from mobile devices? What service do you use?

The new toolbar is a combination of the admin bar and the old Dashboard header. There's now support for drag-and-drop media uploads. The new dropdown menu has become a hover menu. WordPress has also added touch support for iPad. WordPress users who have felt frustrated over the co-editing experience will find this update especially satisfying. Now, the red bar that tells you if someone is editing the post will only pop up if another is actually in the post. The 3.3 version has also added a Tumblr importer so that users can quickly bring their Tumblr blog into the mix.

WordPress 3.2, which was released on July 4, has been downloaded 14 million times. The new version 3.3 is available for download now.

In return, WordPress is offering independent publishers a chance to make money on the WordPress platform. WordPress already provides a healthy living for thousands of self-employed developers, and now publishers have a chance to earn money from their WordPress content, too.

Federated Media is known for representing high-traffic sites. We at ReadWriteWeb work with FM, for example. But Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks, which will help it improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content.

WordPress.com blogs, in total, receive almost 300 million monthly unique visitors, so the partnership between FM and Automattic, parent company of WordPress, is a great opportunity for its advertisers.

You Deserve Better Than AdSense

"We've resisted advertising so far because most of it we had seen wasn't terribly tasteful," says the WordPress announcement. "It seemed like Google's AdSense was the state-of-the-art, which was sad. You pour a lot of time and effort into your blog and you deserve better than AdSense." WordPress wants to serve ads that reflect the individual nature of its bloggers, and the WordAds program, targeted with Lijit's technology, can enable that.

WordPress Is A Job Creator

According to founder Matt Mullenweg in his 2011 State of the Word Address, there are thousands of self-employed developers making a living on the WordPress platform. His voluntary survey recorded 6,800 developers who have built 170,000 sites between them, making a median hourly rate of $50.

WordPress is building a community for independent workers, both developers and publishers, and it's finding ways to make them money and keep them afloat. That's admirable. It may have to resort to some traffic tricks to keep up with the likes of Tumblr, but it does so in order to keep its community going.

Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb's advertising partner.

What content management system(s) do you use, and why?

The announcement also describes the fate of Knol, a collaborative knowledge database like Wikipedia that never made it far off the ground. Google has been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to relaunch the service as Annotum, which is powered by WordPress. In addition to these Web services, Google also announced the end of its RE<C renewable energy research program.

Google is retiring old products en masse on a monthly basis now, shutting down Buzz, Labs, Code Search and more in October. It's all part of the effort to refocus Google on its new social, real-time direction. Old social features such as Google Friend Connect had no chance, since Google+ takes priority now, and the real-time collaboration tools on Wave are being outmoded by Google+, too.

Knol Becomes Annotum, Moves to WordPress

Google has also given up on Knol, its effort to build a collaborative article database like Wikipedia. But the project isn't dead; Google has helped transition the community and its articles over to a WordPress-based platform called Annotum. This revamp comes with open-source themes and free WordPress.com hosting. As Knol shuts down over the course of next year, Annotum will offer tools to help authors move their content over.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, his partner and wife, made a $500,000 donation to the Wikimedia Foundation last week.

Read more about the services Google is closing on the Google Blog.

Also Scrapped: RE<C Renewable Energy Program

In addition to all the Web services, Google also announced the end of the Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C) initiative. This was a research effort to reduce the cost of renewable energy through improvements to solar power technology. Google has published its results up to this point but leaves the rest of the effort up to "other institutions."

Learn more about the transition from Knol to Annotum on the WordPress blog.

The new services include better support for major infrastructure, annual review of clients' entire WordPress hosting stack, an annual security audit and review of best practices and a one-day onsite training of clients' WordPress-focused staff. Pricing starts at $250,000 per year.

WordPress VIP services are growing at a rapid clip. Hosted VIP WordPress sites are currently pulling in 1 billion pageviews per month. Accordingly, Automattic reports that revenues from VIP services have more than doubled year-over-year.

As we reported in August WordPress has seen strong growth overall this year. Around 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress, up from 8.5% last year. It also sustains a community of thousands of self-employed WordPress developers who make a median hourly rate of $50.

And For The Non-VIPs...

The expansion of VIP services follows the announcement in October of a first-time ad partnership with Federated Media, allowing regular WordPress bloggers - those who don't pay $250,000 or more for the privilege - to monetize their content.

But the WordPress experience is steadily changing for those users; in response to stiff competition from more social free blogging sites like Tumblr, everyday WordPress users are having social networking features thrust upon them.

What content management system do you use? Are you happy with it? Share your experiences in the comments

The "like" feature on the photo carousel follows on the heels of WordPress notifications that look exactly like Google+. Earlier this year, WordPress.com added a comment panel to show the most active posts and commenters, and 'follow' buttons and subscription widgets for its Web and Android apps.

This will take you to the photo itself. From there, you're free to "like" it.

The photo carousel will be available to WordPress.org users in the near future. In order to use it, users will first have to install the jetpack.me plugin.

Will the new "like" feature on photo carousels edge Wordpress closer to its super traffic-heavy competitor, Tumblr? Tell us what you think in the comments.

This feature replicates the new, ubiquitous Google+ toolbar pretty audaciously. The only difference is that the WordPress notification badge is orange, whereas Google's is red. Is this formula really the best way to increase engagement, or whatever it is these free social services are trying to make us do?

Only likes and follows are included in WordPress notifications so far, and it only shows the most recent nine entries. The announcement says it will show blog comments in the future, as well as a way to navigate to the full list of past notifications.

Notifications on social networks can be a pain for power users, and WordPress.com has launched its toolbar notifications without a way to manage them. "For those of you who are so popular that you get new followers and likes every few minutes," the announcement says, "we're already thinking about ways to help you manage and limit the flow activity." In other words, there isn't a way yet.

Users will start seeing these notifications next time they get followed or liked.

WordPress Wants To Be More Social

Several WordPress.com updates this year have pushed more social features on users. The comment panel was updated to show the most active posts and commenters. WordPress also added 'Follow' buttons and subscription widgets to its Web and Android apps, following suit after competitor Posterous rearranged its whole service around similar subscription options. Tumblr, which had this kind of sticky following and notifications from the get-go, crushes its competitors in traffic.

How do you feel about the amount of notifications you get on a daily basis?

Federated Media positions WordPress advertising as a more focused alternative to social media buys. The campaigns are content-driven, offering sponsored content curation, sponsored posts and semantic conversation targeting for ads.

Monetizing The Long Tail

Independent publishers on WordPress represent the long tail of Web content. They publish on specific topics for niche audiences. That makes their individual reach small, in terms of raw traffic numbers, but their audiences are highly engaged with particular interests. They're valuable, but they're hard to reach at scale.

Federated Media recently acquired Lijit Networks to improve its targeting of ads to long-tail content. Lijit offers publishers an on-site search box that searches across multiple sites, including blogs, tweets, bookmarks and photos. Publishers can adjust the constraints to include outside content if they want, making Lijit searches a powerful way for visitors to explore topics in more depth. Lijit reports that over 70,000 publishers currently use their service.

In turn, the rich site data gathered by Lijit enables precise and relevant ad targeting, and it has served over 28.3 billion ads so far this year. Lijit's technology, Federated Media's scale and the WordPress.com audience represent a big chunk of high-quality, topically focused Web traffic that major advertisers like AOL, Yahoo! and Google have more trouble monetizing.

This partnership will offer small publishers a way to monetize, and it will give FMP the additional scale of reaching almost 300 million monthly unique visitors to WordPress.com sites.

The State of the Word is Strong

In August, WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg gave his annual State of the Word address, in which he reported some strong numbers. Nearly 15% of the world's websites are powered by WordPress. For every 100 new active domains in the U.S., 22 of them run WordPress.

The open-source blogging platform also provides a thriving economy for developers. A survey of over 18,000 WordPress users and developers offers rich insight into the strength of the platform, and it's all available for anyone to peruse.

You can watch Mullenweg's 2011 address here:

WordPress users: would you opt in to this new ad partnership? Let us know in the comments.

Disclosure: Federated Media is ReadWriteWeb's advertising partner.

Check out the Web 2.0 schedule and watch the events live here.

On the main WordPress blog founder Matt Mullenweg writes:

We work harder and have higher standards because of the bar set by Apple's experiences, and I don't know what WordPress would look like today if not for the inspiration he gave all of us.

The theme was created by Stuart Brown, and WordPress.com users can install it from Appearance → Themes or directly from the Theme Showcase. Here's how Mullenweg describes it:

This theme is a whimsical homage to the days in black and white, celebrating the magic of Mac OS. It displays your menu items, year archives, and categories as folders and icons on the evoked desktop.

For all the memories it brings -- and its throwback design -- this theme has modern functionality under the hood. Create your own custom menu to replace the first set of icons in the sidebar, upload a custom header image to display below the blog title, or set a custom background. Also included are two footer widget areas and a full-width page template that drops the sidebar.

This is such a cool design, and it's a great tribute to the man who redefined user experience for all of us. If you're a WordPress user, try out the theme on your blog and see if it inspires you to make something great.

In another announcement for Android users, WordPress for Android 1.5 is now available, and its major new feature is a blog reader for the WordPress blogs you follow. You can even follow non-WordPress blogs using RSS.

WordPress is a little late to the following party. Though the platform is doing great for publishers and developers, Tumblr, which is built on a following model, is reeling in much more traffic. The new Posterous refresh is also centered around this model, and its new iPhone app emphasizes following and reading the same way today's WordPress for Android update does. Even Facebook has given in to the following model. Don't say "I told you so," Twitter.

Other recent WordPress updates focus on increasing reader engagement as well. The comments panel has been improved to keep track of the regulars, and easy, secure access to the WordPress API has enabled new third-party applications that go beyond simple plug-ins.

How do you like to follow your favorite publishers? RSS? Twitter? Or inside your own platform like Tumblr, Posterous or WordPress? Let us know in the comments.

This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.

Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.

A better comparison these days is between Tumblr and Wordpress.com, the leading full blogging platform. While Wordpress.com still gets more visits (but not page views, as we'll see below), Tumblr is drawing ever closer.

Tumblr vs. Wordpress.com, in visits per month.

The two services offer different things, so this is somewhat of an apples and oranges comparison. Wordpress.com is a fully-fledged hosted blogging platform, while Tumblr is a light blogging and curation service. I myself use both products. However, both are blogging services and so it's worth comparing the statistics.

At the end of last year we estimated that Wordpress.com was larger than Tumblr in terms of unique visitors and number of bloggers. However we noted that Tumblr had about twice the number of page views per month.

On the page view front at least, Tumblr has exploded in recent months. Quantcast puts it at 12 billion per month currently, compared to 1.4B for Wordpress.com. So Tumblr now gets 8.5 times more page views per month than Wordpress.com (at least according to Quantcast, which in my experience tends to be the most accurate public web statistics tool).

Before we get too excited, we should remember that Facebook is still a blue whale compared to both Tumblr and Wordpress.com. Quantcast has Facebook at 7.4 billion visits per month in the U.S. alone.

What's the upshot of all this? Maybe just that Tumblr has scaled incredibly well and shows no signs of slowing down. Wordpress.com hasn't had the same exponential growth, but it's certainly been no slouch either. Both services are enormously popular and many people use them side by side.

Let us know your thoughts on Tumblr compared to Wordpress.com in the comments. Should Wordpress.com be worried?

The blog provider has also announced two new third-party apps for WordPress.com blogs to make them more social and shareable. Feedfabrik now allows WordPress.com users to turn their blogs into books, both in PDF and physical formats (and there's currently a 10% discount offer). Empire Avenue, the free "Social Stock Market" game, has also announced WordPress integration, allowing WordPress bloggers to incorporate their blogging influence into their share price.

The new apps can make WordPress blogs more shareable, but the updated Comments panel adds better social dynamics at a more basic level. Comments are the lifeblood of engagement on a blog, and the new tools will help WordPress authors keep better track of their most engaged readers. Last month, WordPress enabled automated sharing of posts to Facebook pages, which is another way to increase engagement, but as we've found at ReadWriteWeb, automated posting doesn't produce great results. Better comment management could help blog authors keep up conversations with a more authentic voice.

WordPress has reported major growth recently. It currently powers nearly 15% of the world's websites and sustains a thriving community of self-employed developers.

Have you used WordPress? Are you a WordPress developer? Tell us about it in the comments.

Mullenweg's address at the WordCamp conference in San Francisco this week goes through the history of the WordPress user interface, showing how its features developed over time and were then pared down to today's minimal, efficient design. With its frequent adjustments to UI and its healthy market for ready-made and custom themes and plug-ins, WordPress' user friendliness is key to its broad and rapid adoption by content creators. But this year, WordPress conducted its first user and developer survey, receiving over 18,000 responses, and it found a thriving economy for developers and site administrators as well.

In keeping with its open-source mentality, WordPress has made the survey data available here for anyone to root through. Mullenweg shares more about current and future developments at WordPress in the full 30-minute address, which you can watch here:

Have you used WordPress? Are you a WordPress developer? Tell us about it in the comments.

Blog publishing platform WordPress announced this afternoon that its users can now automatically cross-post links to their new blog posts to a Facebook page. Previously, the feature only allowed publishing onto a Facebook account's Wall. Pages are where organizations are supposed to communicate with a large number of interested parties.

WordPress.com's Scott Berkun said that this was one of the features most requested by users. The new feature is fast and easy - but is it something that publishers ought to use? Experience and study of the results of this kind of automation don't always make it look so good.

Last week our new Community Manager Robyn Tippins posted the results of a study she did comparing how our articles performed on Facebook when they were posted manually vs. when they were posted automatically. The results very clearly favored one approach over the other.

Put simply: when we posted each story both automatically and manually, we found that manually-posted links saw twice as much traffic and more than twice as much engagement in the form of sharing and links.

Tippins concluded thusly:

"Manual posting is a chore. What takes the app seconds to post may take me 10 minutes. And, because I am not continually at the computer, some of our content isn't posted immediately after posting. There are definitely cons to manual posting, but the increase in engagement and page views back to our site is worth the additional labor."

Some readers said in comments that Facebook ought to help publishers publish automatically at times when they will see the most engagement. Something like what startup SocialFlow does.

In fact, Facebook's algorithm punishes publishers whose content gets little engagement by making future updates from that publisher less prominent in a user's experience. Ought Facebook instead help publishers publish better? Perhaps the answer is self-evident: publishers seeking maximum engagement and traffic from their Facebook Pages need to post to those pages manually and make an investment of time and energy in cultivating community there.

So, WordPress publishers, now that you can automatically publish links to Facebook Pages - will you?

Over the past week, we at ReadWriteWeb have been obsessed with a new social networking toy called Google Plus. Some of our team think it may even be better than Twitter and Facebook. Personally, I haven't caught the Plus bug yet, and in many ways I'm resisting precisely because I want less social media distractions, not more. Indeed, I think we need more zen on the Web and less plus!

Here's the thing: I find myself wistful for the old days of blogging. Sure I like to network with people, but I prefer exploring creative things - technology, art, music, literature and more. I think that's why I'm less attracted to Google Plus than some. I don't really want yet another way to tell my friends what I'm doing. I'd rather read a biography of an artist, then maybe blog about that (if I had time, but that's another story altogether).

The so-called zen mode in WordPress 3.2 is not a big feature. In fact, it's very simple. The WordPress community WPCandy describes it as "a new mode [that] fades the Dashboard completely into the background." Matt "MT" Thomas, creative director at WordPress founding company Automattic, calls it "akin to using a minimalist web-based text editor." Here's a demo of it, from a couple of months ago when the feature was still in development.

What I like about it is that it focuses the blogger back on the core of their experience: writing. Focus - you've heard of that word, right? I certainly struggle with it in this day and age, when I have tweets, Facebook updates and now Google Plus pings coming at me.

Here's a radical idea: re-discover the zen of blogging, rather than create circles of people in Google Plus. Too crazy?

See also: 6 Excellent Tools For Writing Without Distractions

Photo: h.koppdelaney